Full Description
Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume's chapters reveals the elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology and the life sciences.
Contents
Chapter 1 Human and Object, Subject and Thing: The Troublesome Nature of HumanSubstances of the Body: Blood, Genes, and Personhood, Malin Noem Ravn; Chapter 3 Governing Risk Through Informed Choice: Prenatal Testing in Welfarist Maternity Care, Mianna Meskus; Chapter 4 Visualizing and Calculating Life: Matters of Fact in the Context of Prenatal Risk Assessment, Nete Schwennesen, Lene Koch; Chapter 5 Serious Disease as Kinds of Living, Ayo Wahlberg; Chapter 6 From Society to Molecule and Back: The Contested Scale of Public Health Science, Susanne Bauer; Chapter 7 Life Beyond Information: Contesting Life and the Body in History and MolecularThe Place and Space of Research Work: Studying Control in aAlmost Human: Scientific and Popular Strategies for Making Sense of 'Missing Links', Murray Goulden, Andrew S. Balmer;
